Photography is the new painting

A client visited the gallery recently to look at I Must Behave by Bruce Connew. She surprised me with a question about the validity of photography as an art form... "It is so reproducible." I was stunned - I didn't have a comeback. But what I should have said was "Everything is reproducible in the 21st century, but that certainly doesn't preclude the creation of great images in any media." And of course we all take photographs, but the real skill, the art, is in the production of the image as object - the texture, the quality of the image on the paper. This is the acid test - the translation from the screen to the wall.

And of course photography has its own tricks and knowledge and accidents and wonder that distinguish it from other media without detracting from its appeal. It can reference painting, it can reference its own traditions and practitioners - like any art form it does wherever it wants. I mean look at the image above by Bruce Connew. Gorgeous.

Behaving

Bruce Connew's exhibition I Must Behave includes 14 framed photographs. The I Must Behave series is made up of 90 images. Featured here are two images from the series not included in the exhibition.



I Must Behave takes a sideways look at behaviour. It examines the notion that wherever we are, we are controlled by social, cultural, and political forces.

Censored

Bruce Connew's new exhibition I Must Behave includes his work Censored, recently a finalist in the Waikato Art Awards. Censored is undoubtedly a major work by one of New Zealand's foremost photographers. It will also be published in the May issue of Granta.

Here's what Bruce says about it:
"While in Zhongshan, China, during May 2008, I bought a copy of National Geographic magazine's May 2008, pre-Olympic Games, special issue on China. The magazine was plastic sealed. I cut it open back at my hotel. I removed the plastic, and leisurely thumbed my way through the fresh magazine, reaching page 46, and couldn't help but notice two-and-a-bit lines on the left-hand page excised with heavy black ink. Ah, censored, I deduced, and just 80-odd days out from the Olympic Games. Angled against the light, I could read the excised words, " . . . the Japanese invasion to the Cultural Revolution to the massacre around Tiananmen Square in 1989." Oh dear, that was curiously provocative of National Geographic. I thumbed some more. I came to a page that felt thicker than the others, and figured it was a three-page fold-out; but no, it was a double-page spread that had been glued together. Astonishing - this magazine was turning out to be a collector's item.

I moved along. Two more double-page spreads glued together. I must have spent an hour carefully prising them apart. They had been glued around the bright, red-ink border of each double-page, as if the border had been made for the task, and then the censor had pressed his/her glue stick in a full-page, neatly-formed, marvellously symbolic, diagonal cross that, when prised apart, tore at the printer's ink, immortalising the censor's work, and a government's meaning. This is when I discovered National Geographic had been truly, and improbably, confrontational. Each glued double-page spread dealt with a sensitive, political issue, using, mostly, art works by Chinese artist, some of which had been previously banned."